Society & Culture

Recognized by the Nobel committee for his contributions to behavioral economics—a field that he helped create—Thaler's research bridges the gap between economics and psychology.

Like most African Americans born into slavery, Frederick Douglass was never told the date and year of his birth. He chose February 14 as the day on which to celebrate it, and in 2018 we celebrate the 200th anniversary of his birth. At the University of Rochester, one of the most extensive collections of Douglass artifacts in the country can be found in Rush Rhees Library.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average is undergoing some wild swings. But Narayana Kocherlakota, economics professor and former president of the Minneapolis Fed, sees no reason for immediate concern.

The "Votetilla," a week-long floating theater of canal boats ferrying reenactors of key suffragists such as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton along the Eric Canal, was a multi-agency creative partnership that included the Susan B. Anthony Center (SBAC).

We dug into our special collections to highlight a sampling of hand lettering, from ancient hieroglyphs to modern conscripts.

In a new research report, professor David Primo argues that there’s a disconnect between what the public believe about campaign finance law and the reality, and that many popular reform proposals unlikely to bring the desired results.

Four-time Emmy Award-winner and pioneer of Latino broadcasting Maria Hinojosa says “it’s pretty surreal” to be delivering the University's MLK Commemorative Address this week. She calls Martin Luther King Jr., her “first American hero, the first person who made me believe I had a voice in this country.”

Chicago and Delhi. Rome and Rochester. The students in the 100-level course “The City: Contested Spaces” take a virtual tour of them all, while pondering an overarching question—can people’s lives be reshaped by redesigning urban spaces?

Professor Robert Doran focuses on iconic 20th-century philosophers like Michel Foucault, Hayden White, Gayatri Spivak, and Richard Rorty, and explores critical theory's pivot away from a narrowly focused investigation of meaning and text.

Just before dawn on May 18, 1683, pirates stormed the port city of Veracruz, capturing around 1,500 people and selling them to the slave markets of Haiti and South Carolina. Pablo Sierra Silva, assistant professor of history, is on a mission to trace what happened to them.

For decades, Edward Atwater ’50, a professor emeritus of medicine at the Medical Center, has collected medical history artifacts. In 2007, he began turning his collection of more than 8,000 AIDS education posters over to the University and it is now the world’s largest single collection of visual resources related to AIDS and HIV.

In a series of experiments, Rochester psychologists found that people who sat alone without devices for 15 minutes and chose what to think about experienced the positive effects of solitude: feeling calmer and less anxious, without feeling lonely or sad.